[TheClimate.Vote] November 25, 2020 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*November 25, 2020*/


[following money]
*The secret club for billionaires who care about climate change*
BY BEN STEVERMAN - BLOOMBERG
Nov 17, 2020
A few years ago, the hundreds of members of France's Mulliez family, 
with a global retail empire worth more than $38 billion, decided they 
should take climate change more seriously — or rather, their investment 
portfolio should.

But where to start? Climate change and the fight against it could 
transform almost every sector of the economy as companies clamor for 
ways to cut emissions and even pull carbon dioxide from the air. "This 
space is very broad, and it's complicated," says Delphine Descamps, 
managing director at Creadev, the Mulliez family office, which has about 
€200 million ($236 million) to invest each year.

Then she met Regine Clement, the head of a small, secretive nonprofit 
called Creo Syndicate. An exclusive club of climate-focused investors, 
Creo's mission is to speed up the flow of capital into investments that 
can slow global warming. The group focuses on the richest of the rich, 
working with about 200 families and investment outfits with a total of 
more than $800 billion under management. Prominent members include 
legendary investor Jeremy Grantham and Nat Simons, the son of 
Renaissance Technologies' billionaire founder James Simons. Members must 
pay dues — a "very reasonable" flat fee, Clement says, that makes up 
about half the nonprofit's revenue — and they must prove they're serious 
by planning to make their first investment in climate and sustainability 
within six months. Members must also have assets of at least $100 
million and get approved by the nonprofit's board...
- -
Although it's a nonprofit and doesn't have any money of its own to 
deploy, Creo acts a little like an investment bank, vetting about 300 
deals per year, connecting investors with possible partners, and 
conducting research on technologies. Members have invested in everything 
from batteries and hydrogen fuel to regenerative farmland and greener 
product packaging. Portfolios include still unproven technologies such 
as methods for carbon capture and true long shots like fusion reactors.

Creo members make a wide variety of bets that might make a difference — 
and make money. "This is not philanthropy, this is investment," Clement 
says. Superwealthy families, she says, have an advantage over other 
players: Managing money for future generations, they can afford to wait 
a decade or more for investments to bear fruit. Some members in Europe 
have been rich for hundreds of years. Families "are naturally inclined 
to think long term," she says...
- -
The key to Creo's success, members say, is how it gets very wealthy 
investors in the same room — or on the same Zoom call. "You have people 
with a decade of experience and people with a month of experience," says 
longtime member Reuben Munger, a hedge fund manager who founded Vision 
Ridge Partners as his family office and later turned it into an 
investment firm. With more than $1 billion under management, it 
specializes in sustainable assets.

It helps that families generally aren't trying to pitch to each other 
and that Creo makes no fees on any deals. "There's not a lot of hidden 
agendas," Zabbal says. Creo has tried to unlock even more capital by 
venturing beyond families to large institutional investors that also 
want a head start on climate investing. The nonprofit is working with 
CDPQ, a Quebec pension fund with $333 billion in assets, which launched 
a $500 million investment strategy around climate and sustainability. 
The pension's goal is to invest alongside families or firms in 
late-stage venture companies. The first deal, announced in September, is 
with S2G Ventures, a Chicago firm focused on food and agriculture that's 
backed by Lukas Walton. An heir to the Walmart fortune, he has a net 
worth estimated to be more than $22 billion by the Bloomberg 
Billionaires Index.

Creo members have seen their investments pay off. QuantumScape Corp., a 
battery tech company recently valued at $3.3 billion, received early 
funding from Prelude Ventures, co-founded by Simons and Capricorn 
Investment Group, both Creo members. Participants in the nonprofit also 
invested in early rounds of Tesla Inc. and Beyond Meat, two of 2020's 
best-performing stocks. This kind of success helps convince skeptical 
family members and advisers of what Creo can do.

"The opportunities are tremendous, but it's also overwhelming for 
someone who starts out," Zabbal says. "By investing in collaboration 
with others who bring expertise, it allows more investors to take the leap."
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/11/17/world/billionaires-climate-change/


[Perfect news for days of feasting]
*Returning the 'three sisters' - corn, beans and squash - to Native 
American farms nourishes people, land and cultures*
November 20, 2020 8.15am EST

Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first 
Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the 
pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional Native 
American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were 
part of that 1621 dinner too.

For centuries before Europeans reached North America, many Native 
Americans grew these foods together in one plot, along with the less 
familiar sunflower. They called the plants sisters to reflect how they 
thrived when they were cultivated together.

Today three-quarters of Native Americans live off of reservations, 
mainly in urban areas. And nationwide, many Native American communities 
lack access to healthy food. As a scholar of Indigenous studies focusing 
on Native relationships with the land, I began to wonder why Native 
farming practices had declined and what benefits could emerge from 
bringing them back.

To answer these questions, I am working with agronomist Marshall 
McDaniel, horticulturalist Ajay Nair, nutritionist Donna Winham and 
Native gardening projects in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Minnesota. 
Our research project, "Reuniting the Three Sisters," explores what it 
means to be a responsible caretaker of the land from the perspective of 
peoples who have been balancing agricultural production with 
sustainability for hundreds of years.


Gail Danforth, an Elder of the Oneida Nation in Northeast Wisconsin, 
explains "three sisters" gardening.
*Abundant harvests*
Historically, Native people throughout the Americas bred indigenous 
plant varieties specific to the growing conditions of their homelands. 
They selected seeds for many different traits, such as flavor, texture 
and color.

Native growers knew that planting corn, beans, squash and sunflowers 
together produced mutual benefits. Corn stalks created a trellis for 
beans to climb, and beans' twining vines secured the corn in high winds. 
They also certainly observed that corn and bean plants growing together 
tended to be healthier than when raised separately. Today we know the 
reason: Bacteria living on bean plant roots pull nitrogen - an essential 
plant nutrient - from the air and convert it to a form that both beans 
and corn can use.

Squash plants contributed by shading the ground with their broad leaves, 
preventing weeds from growing and retaining water in the soil. Heritage 
squash varieties also had spines that discouraged deer and raccoons from 
visiting the garden for a snack. And sunflowers planted around the edges 
of the garden created a natural fence, protecting other plants from wind 
and animals and attracting pollinators.

Interplanting these agricultural sisters produced bountiful harvests 
that sustained large Native communities and spurred fruitful trade 
economies. The first Europeans who reached the Americas were shocked at 
the abundant food crops they found. My research is exploring how, 200 
years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great Lakes and 
along the Missouri and Red rivers fed fur traders with their diverse 
vegetable products.

*Displaced from the land*
As Euro-Americans settled permanently on the most fertile North American 
lands and acquired seeds that Native growers had carefully bred, they 
imposed policies that made Native farming practices impossible. In 1830 
President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which made it 
official U.S. policy to force Native peoples from their home locations, 
pushing them onto subpar lands.

On reservations, U.S. government officials discouraged Native women from 
cultivating anything larger than small garden plots and pressured Native 
men to practice Euro-American style monoculture. Allotment policies 
assigned small plots to nuclear families, further limiting Native 
Americans' access to land and preventing them from using communal 
farming practices.

Native children were forced to attend boarding schools, where they had 
no opportunity to learn Native agriculture techniques or preservation 
and preparation of Indigenous foods. Instead they were forced to eat 
Western foods, turning their palates away from their traditional 
preferences. Taken together, these policies almost entirely eradicated 
three sisters agriculture from Native communities in the Midwest by the 
1930s.

*Reviving Native agriculture*
Today Native people all over the U.S. are working diligently to reclaim 
Indigenous varieties of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers and other crops. 
This effort is important for many reasons.

Improving Native people's access to healthy, culturally appropriate 
foods will help lower rates of diabetes and obesity, which affect Native 
Americans at disproportionately high rates. Sharing traditional 
knowledge about agriculture is a way for elders to pass cultural 
information along to younger generations. Indigenous growing techniques 
also protect the lands that Native nations now inhabit, and can 
potentially benefit the wider ecosystems around them.

Video https://youtu.be/IooHPLjXi2g
Members of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network explain the cultural 
importance of access to traditional seed varieties.

But Native communities often lack access to resources such as farming 
equipment, soil testing, fertilizer and pest prevention techniques. This 
is what inspired Iowa State University's Three Sisters Gardening 
Project. We work collaboratively with Native farmers at Tsyunhehkw, a 
community agriculture program, and the Ohelaku Corn Growers Co-Op on the 
Oneida reservation in Wisconsin; the Nebraska Indian College, which 
serves the Omaha and Santee Sioux in Nebraska; and Dream of Wild Health, 
a nonprofit organization that works to reconnect the Native American 
community in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, with traditional Native 
plants and their culinary, medicinal and spiritual uses.

We are growing three sisters research plots at ISU's Horticulture Farm 
and in each of these communities. Our project also runs workshops on 
topics of interests to Native gardeners, encourages local soil health 
testing and grows rare seeds to rematriate them, or return them to their 
home communities.

The monocropping industrial agricultural systems that produce much of 
the U.S. food supply harms the environment, rural communities and human 
health and safety in many ways. By growing corn, beans and squash in 
research plots, we are helping to quantify how intercropping benefits 
both plants and soil.

By documenting limited nutritional offerings at reservation grocery 
stores, we are demonstrating the need for Indigenous gardens in Native 
communities. By interviewing Native growers and elders knowledgeable 
about foodways, we are illuminating how healing Indigenous gardening 
practices can be for Native communities and people - their bodies, minds 
and spirits.

Our Native collaborators are benefiting from the project through 
rematriation of rare seeds grown in ISU plots, workshops on topics they 
select and the new relationships they are building with Native gardeners 
across the Midwest. As researchers, we are learning about what it means 
to work collaboratively and to conduct research that respects protocols 
our Native collaborators value, such as treating seeds, plants and soil 
in a culturally appropriate manner. By listening with humility, we are 
working to build a network where we can all learn from one another.
https://theconversation.com/returning-the-three-sisters-corn-beans-and-squash-to-native-american-farms-nourishes-people-land-and-cultures-149230


[movie on HULU]
*"I Am Greta" isn't About Climate Change. It's About the Elusiveness of 
Sanity in an Insane World*
BY JONATHAN COOK - Nov 20, 2020
Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was 
forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to 
power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship 
between society and the individual.

In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity 
referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to adapt to 
the society they lived in. Rather, society itself could become so 
pathological, so detached from a normative way of life, that it induced 
a deep-seated alienation and a form of collective insanity among its 
members. In modern western societies, where automation and mass 
consumption betray basic human needs, insanity might not be an 
aberration but the norm...
- -
Our world is not one of the sane versus the insane, but of the less 
insane versus the more insane.

Which is why I recommend the new documentary I Am Greta, a very intimate 
portrait of the Swedish child environmental activist Greta Thunberg....

    *I Am Greta - Official UK Trailer*
    Sep 17, 2020
    Dogwoof
    In cinemas now: https://www.iamgreta.film
    The story of teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg is told through
    compelling, never-before-seen footage in this documentary following
    her rise to prominence and her global impact as she sparks school
    strikes and protests around the world.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i74n4BUYgHI&feature=emb_logo...

We are in an ideological bubble - and one that will burst as surely as 
the financial kind. Thunberg is that still, small voice of sanity 
outside the bubble. We can listen to her, without fear, without 
reproach, without adulation, without cynicism. Or we can carry on with 
our insane games until the bubble explodes.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/20/i-am-greta-isnt-about-climate-change-its-about-the-elusiveness-of-sanity-in-an-insane-world/ 




[Digging back into the internet news archive]
*On this day in the history of global warming - November 25, 2006 *
The Washington Post reports:

    "While the political debate over global warming continues, top
    executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have
    accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see
    federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.

    "The Democratic takeover of Congress makes it more likely that the
    federal government will attempt to regulate emissions. The companies
    have been hiring new lobbyists who they hope can help fashion a
    national approach that would avert a patchwork of state plans now in
    the works. They are also working to change some company practices in
    anticipation of the regulation."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112401361_pf.html


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